Week 7: Back to at Home School

Some I Brick builds came available while K was away at Legoland. The first thing he did when he got home was do the lessons on those builds.

Drag racecar

Rescue helicopter

He also built a Lego set and has been getting plenty of imaginative play using it. By the end of the week, he was treating it like a memory game, taking it apart and putting it together without looking at the instructions.

Because the the trip, he was behind on some OpenEd classes we'd signed up for. So K spent some time watching those videos.

Making "unpoppable" bubbles

He really enjoyed experimenting with the bubbles.

He did one on exploring cores of rock layers using candy bars.

 

He also did salt watercolor paintings.

K had four OpenEd clubs this week. Keeping with the ocean theme, in Animal Studies he made an octopus. He spent a lot of extra time learning chess strategies for Chess Club. He also had fun in Escape Room Club and Minecraft Club.

Disney theme escape room craft

For language arts we studies verbs. He loved playing verb bingo as well as a statue game. For the game, one person calls out a word, if it's a verb, the others do the action, if it's not, you stand still like a statue. We also put our creative caps on to think of more descriptive verbs. Example: jump vs leap, bound, spring, etc. 

In math, we started the week back with multiplying 3's, however we had barely begun when 3x9 caught his attention. One thing I love about homeschooling is the ability to pivot when we want. This week we had a lot of fun exploring all the cool things about 9 times tables.

Pictured above K is learning a fun math pattern. When you know the answer to a tens times table, you can subtract the multiplied number from the answer to get what that number times 9 equals. 10x5=50 50-5=45 which is 5x9.  

Or that when you list the answers in order, the first number goes up by one while the second number goes down by one.

18

27

36

45

54  

Or that the two numbers in the answer add up to nine. 1+8=9, 2+7=9, 3+6=9. Once you get past 10, the numbers- when counting the first two digits as one number- add up to 18 all the way to 9x20.  Then they add up to 27 until 9x30, etc.

Or that when finding the answer to a multiple of 9, all you have to do is subtract one from the number being multiplied and then find what equals 9. For example 9x7. 7-1=6, 6+3=9 so 9x7=63.

That idea is even simpler when it comes to dividing. Look at the digit in the 10's place, add 1 to it, and that gives you the answer.  For example 72÷9= 8 (7+1), 81÷9=9 (8+1)

He was way more impressed with these fun patterns than he was with the finger trick, which was really abstract to him. He kept seeing each hand as separate numbers instead of all the fingers after the downed digit as a whole.

By the end of the week we did go back to 3's.

Jump counting by 3's

K also practiced cursive and typing. He did spelling and read many books. We also did another Mel science corrosive experiment from our chemistry kit.

Magnesium prevents iron from rusting.

Lastly, inspired by Legoland, K and A2 went out and built their own theme park design, complete with slides, rollercoasters, water features, and a whole row of souvenir shops(😅). 

It was a full week of learning.